Spectrum 643. Educating Rita

Rita Thomas was brought up in the upper class Wellington suburb of Kelburn where she expected the social calendar of her late teenage years to be filled with occasions befitting her background. Instead of dances and dinner parties, the outbreak of World War II in 1939 sent the young men overseas and Rita into essential war work.

A stint in a pea processing factory was followed by service in the Land Army and posting to a farm in Motueka, "I had visions of a sheep station complete with ballroom and tennis courts, that's how naive I was..." Rita looks back on her wartime education in conversation with Jack Perkins.